Fake News

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GO TenQuestionsForFakeNewsFINAL. Stanford Study Finds Most Students Vulnerable To Fake News. Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion. In the wake of the 2016 election, everyone from President Obama to Pope Francis has raised concerns about fake news and the potential impact on both political life and innocent individuals.

Some fake news has been widely shared, and so-called “pizzagate” stories led a North Carolina man to bring a gun into a popular Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant under the impression that it was hiding a child prostitution ring. According to a new survey by Pew Research Center, most Americans suspect that made-up news is having an impact. About two-in-three U.S. adults (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. This sense is shared widely across incomes, education levels, partisan affiliations and most other demographic characteristics. These results come from a survey of 1,002 U.S. adults conducted from Dec. 1 to 4, 2016.
Start with a Question: What should educators do about fake news?
The fake news phenomenon has been developing alongside the growth of social media for years, but it is getting more attention presently because of the important role accurate and inaccurate information can play in a presidential election.

Since 50% of young adults get their news primarily online, and teachers observe their younger students doing the same, many educators have growing concerns about their students' abilities to identify the real from the fake news on the internet. The most alarming statistics came recently from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, 82% of middle schoolers were unable to distinguish between "sponsored content" and a real news story on a website.
Can You Spot the Liar?
9: Other Stories From This Source Are Incredulous - 10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Story. Our list of fake websites was by no means exhaustive, and new ones open up every week.

So how can you tell if a site is reliable if it's not on any list of fake websites? One way is to do a quick scan of some of the headlines and first few paragraphs of other stories on the site. Let's say you're interested in a story with the headline, "President Obama Suffers Heart Attack.
" That certainly sounds plausible. But if some of the other headlines on the site read "Grandmother Mates with Croc," "9-Year-Old Accidentally Discovers Cure for Cancer" and "Sky Over Oklahoma City Actually Rains Cats and Dogs," you should be wary. Of course, the other headlines may not be quite that fantastical.

Can You Tell Fake News From Real? Study Finds Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability. Stanford researchers assessed students from middle school to college and found they struggled to distinguish ads from articles, neutral sources from biased ones and fake accounts from real ones.

Gary Waters/Ikon Images/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Gary Waters/Ikon Images/Getty Images Stanford researchers assessed students from middle school to college and found they struggled to distinguish ads from articles, neutral sources from biased ones and fake accounts from real ones. If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.
How To Spot A Fake News Story. The rise and proliferation of fake news stories has been much discussed lately.

Some claim the wild and reckless distribution of baseless stories about Hillary Clinton swung the election to her opponent. There may be some truth in that. But fake news stories had been around long before election 2016. Indeed, the idea of making stuff up and passing it off as journalist quality news goes all the way back to the advent of the tabloids.

What Are You Doing to Teach Students to Spot Fake News Stories?
Posted by Bill Ferriter on Sunday, 11/20/2016 One of the most interesting conversations currently taking place around Donald Trump's surprise victory in our Presidential election has been the role that fake news peddled and promoted in Facebook news streams may have played in swaying voters.

Mark Zuckerberg -- Facebook's charismatic founder -- has called the notion that fake news is a problem on his site "a pretty crazy idea" and argued that a clear process is in place that allows users to flag suspicious or hateful content for further review. But that position was openly challenged over and over again all week long. Buzzfeed, a popular online source covering digital media and technology, opened the criticism by publishing the frightening results of an analysis of the election stories generating the most engagement -- think likes, shares and comments -- on Facebook in the final three months of the election. Here's what they found: From the NPR article: It's not pretty: #youshouldbe. Aisha Sultan: Teaching children how to spot real news from fake news. There’s a mild-mannered warrior in the front lines of the propaganda wars.

Kylie Peters, a librarian in the Chicago area, has been concerned about the rise of so-called “fake news”: deliberately false stories made to appear factual, designed to sway public opinion. “Librarians are the original search engine,” said Peters, who works at Geneva Public Library in suburban Chicago. A recent analysis showed that fake or hoax stories got more reader engagement on Facebook than real news stories during the last three months of the election. “People think they don’t need libraries because of Google. In fact, they need us more than ever to help them combat information overload, and sort and evaluate the current glut of information,” Peters wrote in a recent Facebook post.